Reduce annoyance in selecting desired state from dropdown menus

[jenniferthibault]

This could have a lot of solutions, so I'm going to focus on the issue and why this minor annoyance seems issue-worthy.

The State or territory filter is one of the top re-used filter patterns across data sets. No matter what financials or filings you're looking up, if you're interested in House/Senate races or candidates, narrowing down by state is a critical interaction.

And right now, that interaction experience causes a minor hiccup that I've wanted to file an issue for for a while.

When you want to choose a state, the only way to do that is to scroll through the menu. The annoyance in this is that there are interaction models that have become convention for getting to the state you want faster, such as beginning to type in the state name (even if there is no text field) or typing the state abbreviation to match you to the state.

I was having a hard time navigating the research spreadsheet, but I recall a few different interviews I've observed where the user attempted to do this when selecting a state, and momentarily got caught up when it didn't follow that expected behavior. @nickykrause could you help parse the spreadsheet to see if this was noted?

I was inspired to file this when reading up on Nielsen Norman's User Annoyance article:

Annoyances matter, because they compound. If the offending state-field drop-down were a site's only usability violation, I'd happily award the site a gold star for great design. But sites invariably have a multitude of other annoyances, each of which delays users, causes small errors, or results in other unpleasant experiences.

[nickykrause]

I will look more at the history of the usability testing, but the annoyance that I recall from recent tests was two users who accessed the state filter and selected a state found it slightly annoying that that state filter stayed open.

In this case, the users were selecting just one state; if they had wanted to select more than one, they might have found it helpful that it stayed open, rather than annoying. They also were looking for a state that appeared fairly high in the alphabetical list, so they did not have to scroll much.

I have no qualms with the idea of looking into the ability to start typing the state name. One thing this is bringing to mind for me, though, is that typing the state is often so helpful because the user is filling out a form, and is primarily using the keyboard to complete fields + using tab to move between fields. I haven't really thought about this before now, but I wonder if users are mostly mouse-clicking their way around the advanced data table experience. Even if that's true, that wouldn't mean that matching the state by typing wouldn't be useful, but it might mean that mouse-based solutions are not so bad either. (Of course, I know we do have other filter fields where users are typing -- not saying it's all mouse)

All that said, with much personal bias, I will add that as someone from Wisconsin, it is quite annoying to scroll all the way to the bottom of the list when selecting my state :smile:

[jenniferthibault]

Issue moved to 18F/fec-cms #1594 via ZenHub